Full title (Editorial Board Members)

Editorial: Twenty‐Five Years Later…

For many years, the ISJ has been included within the quaintly named "basket" of eight (Bo8) premier journals, an endeavour of the Association for Information Systems' (AIS) College of Senior Scholars (CSS)1 to single out the top journals in the field of Information Systems (IS). At its 2019 meeting in Munich, concerns were expressed that the Bo8's editorial boards were insufficiently diverse and as a result the CSS commissioned a task force to investigate the extent to which the editorial boards of the eight journals reflected the diversity of the AIS itself. The task force chose to define "editorial board" as meaning the people most directly connected with managing submitted articles, that is, the Senior and Associate Editors of a journal, but excluded the advisory board or a more general list of reviewers. It collected publicly-available data (primarily from journal and individual websites), and also consulted with the editors of the eight journals, before compiling a report that is available from the CSS website2 and that has been recently published as Beath et al. (2021). In this editorial, I deal with the report insofar as it pertains to the ISJ. I chart the current state of diversity in the ISJ's editorial board, but also take issue with some of the parameters of the report itself and suggest alternative ways of examining diversity. Finally, I outline some of my plans for further diversification of the ISJ and the ways in which this diversity can be measured. The ideas in and structure of this editorial have been significantly informed by Monideepa Tarafdar (senior editor at the ISJ) and Cynthia Beath (a member of the journal's advisory board and a forthright supporter of the journal). Benchmarking diversity lies at the heart of the CSS Diversity report. As Beath et al. (2021) note, "Editorial board diversity, we believe, is a signal that the journal is open to and inclusive of all authors". The task force decided to limit its assessment of diversity to three demographic indicators, viz. gender, regional and ethnic diversity. Diversity was benchmarked on the data of the 3210 individuals who were paid-up Academic members of the AIS on 31/12/2019. Thus, the diversity of the editorial boards of the Bo8 as a whole and of the eight journals individually were compared to the diversity of AIS Academic members in terms of gender (actually sex, i.e., female or male), AIS region (1, 2 or 3) of current employment, and ethnicity.3 While gender and region of current employment are automatically collected by the AIS as part of membership demographics, ethnicity data was manually created by one of the task force members and mapped onto a simplified template that was restricted to terms adapted from the US census: (a) Chinese, (b) Indian subcontinent, (c) other Asian, (d) Black/African descent, (e) Caucasian/European descent, (f) Middle Eastern descent, (g) Hispanic (only in Region 1 because the term is largely meaningless elsewhere) and (h) Other (e.g., indigenous). In Table 1 below, AIS data for these various demographic indicators are compared with ISJ data (the 68 SEs and AEs of the ISJ, current on 1 January 2021) for the same indicators. Beath et al. (2021) report a similar analysis for all eight journals (with data collected in January 2020) that includes standard deviations, but Table 1 is sufficient for the current purposes. Eyeballing the data in this way is instructive. Superficially, it appears that while the ISJ's gender proportions are roughly in line with the AIS benchmark (in contrast to the basket as a whole), we have too few editorial board members from region 1 (while the basket has too many), too many from region 2 (the basket is about right) and about the right number from region 3 (the basket has too few). Where ethnicity is concerned, we have too many Chinese, too few other Asians (e.g., Thai, Korean, Japanese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, etc.), Caucasians/of European descent and of Middle Eastern descent, and about the right number of Black/of African descent, Indian subcontinent and Hispanic. My immediate observation when I saw the numbers was to think that hitting any of the AIS benchmarks would be entirely fortuitous: while we certainly champion diversity across all aspects of the ISJ and have deliberately sought to bring in more people from historically under-represented groups, we do not deliberately attempt to emulate AIS proportions, hitherto unknown. Indeed, as the AIS membership evolves, so the proportions will evolve and thus any target is going to be a moving one. Nevertheless, I would like to see more diversity in general, and not for a small number of ethnicities to dominate. The AIS CSS report makes six recommendations for change to the CSS itself, 5 to the AIS, and 15 for the consideration of the Bo8 journal editors. I do not plan to list or address all 15 here, but I do note that one of the recommendations is that editors should establish diversity and inclusion indicators that are appropriate for each journal and then to set measurable targets related to those indicators. I caution here that while the AIS benchmarks are instructive they are also limited in their scope. However, I agree that each journal editor should identify a set of diversity and inclusion indicators that make sense in the context of the journal and its readership. Extending these indicators beyond the three that the Task Force has relied on in this report is necessary. An important aspect of the AIS CSS report, and it is one that I share, is the belief that diversity is a good thing. My interpretation of the "diversity is good" argument is that when we include a wider range of perspectives, we will make better decisions and thus enhance quality. We will also demonstrate the openness of the journal to a diversity of authors. Thus, while I am generally in favour of indicators as useful ways of thinking about diversity, and there are many indicators in this editorial, I feel that hard targets are risky because it means that we embark on the slippery slope that leads to quotas and bean counting, both of which I wish to avoid. Nevertheless, I report data for the ISJ below so as to provide an indication of the current situation with respect to various indicators. Readers can decide for themselves if more specific targets are warranted. A second area relates to transparency: journal editors need to report on their diversity and inclusion statistics somewhere, either on the journal website or else in some other public way, such as this editorial, which is freely accessible from the ISJ website. I plan to update these data on an annual basis, either in future editorials or elsewhere on the ISJ website. While the level of diversity in the ISJ is high (at least according to the AIS indicators), it could be higher, particularly with regard to the extent to which minority groups are represented. The same comment, of course, applies to the AIS itself. Achieving a higher level of diversity will require attention to a range of indicators that I outline below. However, diversity must never come at the expense of merit: we expect that SEs and AEs will fit and enhance the ethos of the journal. I have no intention of descending to the point where I cherry pick individuals exclusively for their contribution to a diversity indicator irrespective of other attributes of their suitability for the position. This brings me to a more detailed critique of the AIS report and data. Firstly, I find that the AIS region and ethnicity coding to be coarse: just three regions and eight ethnic groups. Splitting AIS members into (only) three regions conceals a huge lack of diversity. The vast majority (88%) of Region 1 AIS members live in one country, the USA, but as a journal editor, I would like to seek submissions from authors distributed across the region. This will have an impact on targets: while I think we do need more Region 1 editorial board members, they do not all have to come from the USA. They should come from across the region. Thus, I plan to search for potential SEs and AEs from all countries within Region 1. To that end, I recently appointed an AE from Brazil and I am actively seeking other qualified individuals. A similar problem exists in Region 2, where the vast majority of AIS members work in Western Europe, with very few in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and all of Africa. The almost complete absence of African scholars grossly limits the diversity of the AIS. A similar pattern applies to the ISJ editorial board, and while we do have African scholars on the ISJ editorial board, none of them currently live in Africa. Finally, Region 3 has better diversity data both among AIS members and with respect to ISJ editorial board members, who come from various parts of Asia and Australasia, though none from the Pacific Islands at the time of writing. That said, while we do have Indian scholars among our SEs and AEs, none of them actually live in India and only one received her PhD from India. Diversity is not just gender, country of birth and ethnicity: it is also where one studied, was professionally socialised, where one lives, works and breathes. Thus, using the region of employment or residence but not the natal origin or the location of postgraduate study as the basis of regional classification is quite problematic because the AIS regions are so large and conceal so much diversity. I do not find the AIS regions a good proxy for anything very useful except the most general kind of assessment of where editorial board members live. As I argue below, the actual state of diversity in the ISJ's editorial board is much richer than the data in the AIS CSS report suggests. But what we need to do is to examine some different aspects of the diversity. My first step was to look at the country of current employment, the country where a PhD was obtained and the natal origin (country) of the ISJ's SEs and AEs. This is presented in Table 2 below. Here, a more detailed picture emerges, with 36 countries indicated. Our editorial board members live in 16 countries, earned their PhDs in 17 countries and have natal origins in 29 countries. While 24% of our editorial board members were born in, studied in and now live in the same country, most of them moved at some stage, which I suspect parallels behaviour across the AIS more generally. Considering our SEs and AEs, some stayed at home to study and then moved away (11%) while others moved away to study and then returned (8%). Others moved away to study and then stayed there (32%). A final group moved away to study and then moved elsewhere to work (24%). These figures attest to a global diversity of the ISJ's editorial board in a way that is not captured by the AIS benchmark comparative data. However, a new bias emerges here: while 26 SEs/AEs were born in the global south (developing countries), only two received their PhDs in the global south and only five currently live in the global south. This is a matter for some concern, though it probably reflects global educational movements and cannot easily be addressed at the scale of one journal. Beyond editorial board data, I also felt that it would be instructive to examine the provenance of our authors. Who are they? Where do they live? Obtaining raw data from manuscript central is not too difficult, but parsing it by gender is not at all simple and prone to error. Although genderizing software programmes exist, these tend to be more accurate with "western" names that often tend to be gender specific, and tend to be much less accurate with non-western names. For instance, the Chinese name that is rendered as "Li Li" in the Roman alphabet (i.e., family name and given name are both Li), could involve a number of different characters in Chinese, and so could be male or female. Here are some examples: 李俐, 李力, 黎莉, 黎厉, 厉俪. All five would be romanised as Li Li (in Mandarin), but the act of romanisation removes any way of even guessing at the gender based on the characters. Incidentally, the first, third and fifth are more likely to be female, while the second and fourth are more likely to be male, but these are not absolute. Sometimes females have "male" names and vice versa. Since manuscript central only captures the romanised form, it is impossible to determine gender unless someone does an intensive search for the named individual and ideally finds a photograph or some other gender-identifiable evidence on the Internet, such as a website that uses the male or female personal pronoun. An easier solution is that we ask ScholarOne to request the inclusion of gender when a paper is submitted. However, this is controversial: some believe that the submission of gender data should never be mandatory and indeed, in some countries, it is illegal to collect it. Despite these genderising challenges, I attempted to assess the gender distribution of submissions to ISJ, in response to a request that I look for change in gender distribution of submissions to the journal pre- and during-pandemic. I was able to assign genders to the first authors of 95% of the papers submitted in March–May of 2019 and in the same months of 2020. The results showed that the gender distribution in 2019 was very similar to the gender distribution among AIS Academic members: 35% female/65% male. In 2020, the proportion of submissions from females was actually higher: 40% female/60% male. While this is a very limited analysis of the gender distribution of submitters to ISJ, it does suggest that even during challenging times, the journal is attracting significant submissions from females. Nevertheless, manuscript central data for the ISJ do indicate the country from which the first author is submitting and this provides a very rough indicator of geographical diversity. Therefore, I downloaded the metadata for all submissions to the ISJ from 2011–2020, that is, 10 years of data. This reveals that we have received 2933 submissions from first authors working in 95 countries. See Table 3. Although 95 countries seem to provide considerable evidence of diversity, only 11 of them are in AIS Region 1, while 63 are in Region 2 and 21 are in Region 3. [AIS itself has members from 14 Region 1 countries, 63 Region 2 countries and 22 Region 3 countries]. Within Region 2, 16 countries in Africa are represented among our submitting authors [There are AIS members from 18 countries in Africa]. Where accepted papers are concerned, the situation is not quite so diverse (see Table 4). Over the same 10-year period, we accepted papers from authors based in 28 countries: three in Region 1 (only one, Brazil, is outside North America), 16 in Region 2 (though none from Africa) and 9 in Region 3. On balance, I feel that this more detailed analysis presents a richer picture of the diversity of the ISJ, but there is still room for improvement. The fact that we have submitting authors from 95 countries, and have accepted papers from authors located in 28 countries, sounds impressive, but there is no basis for comparison with other journals. What is critical is that authors should feel welcome, no matter who they are, where they come from, what kind of IS research they do. This spirit of inclusiveness is what diversity really means. It may be that we cannot accept their papers, but at the very least, we must offer constructive feedback that will help them to enhance the quality of their research and writing. This is something that we already do, and indeed I am positively biased to appoint AEs and SEs on the basis of such constructive reviews and reports, because they demonstrate affiliation with the journal's mission. Having a globally distributed editorial board helps if those board members promote the ISJ in their own communities as a desirable journal in which to publish, and as a journal that will give them constructive feedback. In appointing an AE or SE, while the ability of the individual to perform in this role at a high level is essential, I am also interested in the network of the individual concerned. AEs often assign papers to be reviewed by colleagues in their network. AEs and SEs can also promote the journal within their network. Thus, greater diversity in the editorial board is likely to lead to greater diversity in the submitting authors. This is a worthwhile objective. I hope that the AIS CSS will consider a more sophisticated analysis of diversity in future years. Finally, I come to the tricky issue of identifying diversity and inclusion indicators. As I mentioned above, I am loath to be too specific: I do not think it is sensible for us to set precise quotas for any particular AIS region, gender or location of current work. Nevertheless, I do consider that the current levels of diversity (on multiple indicators) are not only respectable and appropriate for the journal, but also self-sustaining. We have excellent networks among authors and reviewers, ensuring that the ISJ will continue to attract suitably qualified individuals in multiple roles. Nevertheless, I recognise that we have few editorial board members who either received their PhDs in or live in the global south: I am striving to appoint more. The AIS CSS Task Force suggested that editors appoint AEs on a trial basis with some mentoring from more senior members of the editorial board. I find that this is a sensible suggestion that fits well with an SE-AE structure, such that we need to be open to new junior AEs, so long as they are mentored by more senior SEs. Including junior AEs from the global south will be an effective way of ensuring that our diversity extends beyond the developed countries. Indeed, I suggest that the AIS CSS Task Force consider a 6-region split, with separate identification of developed and developing countries (global north and global south) in each of the current AIS regions. This will encourage journal editors to consider how they can achieve diversity in a more nuanced way than the current 3-way split. Where gender is concerned, if anything we should be looking to appoint more female board members since we expect the AIS proportions to shift towards parity over time. Overall, I believe that the ISJ will be best served by a variety of people in SE and AE roles across multiple indicators. If our SEs and AEs perfectly matched the AIS benchmarks for gender, location and ethnicity, but had received their professional training in a small group of countries/universities, spoke the same language, subscribed to the same epistemological beliefs and undertook the same kind of research, then that would not count as a diverse editorial board in my view. I note that while approximately half of our SEs and AEs received their PhDs and currently work in countries where English is the "national language", less than 14% were born in a country where English is the "national language". This in part reflects the global educational migrations that I referred to earlier. It also suggests that well over 80% of our SEs and AEs have successfully made that transition from a first language other-than-English to succeed in an English-dominated academic culture. I regard this as a valid aspect of diversity that we need to uphold and celebrate. I also hope that these non-native English speakers will be more understanding of the difficulties that similar authors face, will be constructive and developmental in their reviews and reports and will encourage them to submit to the ISJ. A polyglot editorial board is an asset to the journal and is something we should maintain or enhance. As I mentioned above, I believe that a diverse editorial board will help us to attract a diverse set of authors (and for that matter readers). At this point, I will also mention the editorial advisory board, which for the ISJ consists of 36 people. Many of them are associated with the same countries as the editorial board, but to that list of 36 countries, I can and It is my hope that the editorial advisory board members actively encourage potential authors to submit to the ISJ, where and so actively to the diversity of the journal. All the to this point has diversity as by multiple of demographic indicators. I suggest that this is are also indicators to which we have not the of a submitting is a journal open to and of different of research, different different epistemological It is for an editor to a of But how does that of openness into the papers that are submitted to and accepted for Here, I see two indicators, each of which is though with some Firstly, what are the of of the editorial board At the ISJ, we do collect this each AE and SE is to provide to 10 that identify We this to assign Since the are there is a considerable and many But in terms of diversity, I would like our editorial board members to be diverse to be able to any paper that is within and that is submitted to the ISJ. At the time of we have and I consider that this indicator is with further diversification not At the same it is important that members of the be very with authors should not have to the on of for instance, since an accepted should not include a to the that is The may be for an that makes an at the ISJ, we have recently the as a new of how diverse is the research that is actually submitted and Although it would not be hard to a of research though it would be more to each to this Nevertheless, such an would certainly have the of what is what we and what we I would not to do this analysis for submitted but it could be for each submitted and each published in the 10 years. However, such a will take more time than I have at my at least for the time Finally, I have to that each journal has its It would be if all journals with the same the same the same people. as diversity and inclusiveness are journals need to maintain their individual often a journal to submit to because of that indeed, I encourage authors to an with a specific journal in since if the fit is good then the of is In this issue of the ISJ, we In the first et al. (2021) the problem of and context in research in IS and the potential of research They argue that many of the associated with research are and also to their and They further argue that these may in the if do not actively on how they the research They a research for research, research as a and on three levels of and In the second and (2021) how when of their They on and study the a which is both for personal and in for professional purposes. from they that when they will using the a or their The authors to the a to they identify that are for than and they the that these In the third and (2021) examine which both an state of and how that state is with the in the context of a study with and data, the authors that with and a while and and and actual to The study to the of the by the new of based on a and that that many are an the and the of a In the fourth et al. (2021) how using as a for individuals identify has But is about how individuals to potential The authors related to from a the number of an was as the of the reports, the of the on and the of the The results showed that work to encourage and the most on related to to and with I am to my colleagues at the ISJ and elsewhere for their to multiple of this Cynthia Monideepa

A New Era

TAPPI is pleased to announce that Dr. Arthur J. Ragauskas has assumed the editor-in-chief role for TAPPI Journal. Ragauskas, who is a professor at University of Tennessee (UT) in Knoxville, TN, has been a member of the TAPPI Journal Editorial Board since 2011 and is a TAPPI Fellow, as well as recipient of the TAPPI Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal Award, among his many accomplishments. As a member of the Editorial Board, Ragauskas has curated eight special issues on a range of topics, including nanocellulose, lignocellulose, lignin valorization, and the forest biorefinery.

BackgroundAlthough low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) have great disease burden, but the lack of studies from LMIC have been shown in several fields. Multiple researchers from LMIC perceive editorial bias against their studies. Editorial board members (EBMs) from LMIC are under-represented across many medical journals. It is still unclear whether this phenomenon exists in the field of hand research. The purpose of this study was to investigate the composition of EBMs in leading subspecialty hand journals, and to reveal the international representation of EBMs in the field of hand research.MethodsThis cross-sectional study included seven leading subspecialty hand journals. The EBMs were obtained from the journals’ websites. The country affiliations of EBMs were categorized based on their locations and economy status. The composition of EBMs was investigated.ResultsThere were 211 EBMs in the seven journals. A total of 185 EBMs (87.7%) were affiliated with high-income countries (HIC), 18 (8.5%) with upper middle-income countries, and 8 (3.8%) with lower middle-income countries. None EBMs were affiliated with low income countries. The EBMs were affiliated with 30 countries. The biggest number of EBMs were affiliated with the USA 74 (35.07%), followed by the United Kingdom (45, 21.33%), and France (13, 6.16%). Most of EBMs were based in Europe and Central Asia (86, 40.8%) and North America (81, 38.4%).ConclusionsThe EBMs of leading subspecialty hand journals are dominated by HIC with a very low representation of LMIC. There is a need to make the editorial boards more international in the field of hand research.

Editorial board members (EBMs) of academic journals have been frequently studied for better understanding the principles of their functioning, impact on editorial policy, publication ethics, and entire scientific progress. One of the promising trends is to quantitatively evaluate the contribution of EBMs to the scholarly output of parent journals. This paper represents the results of the study on publication activity of editorial board members of the Russian Library and Information Science journals. To detect a share of papers by EBMs in the journal’s scholarly output, we studied a share of EBMs papers in parent journals and other sources. Generally, we detected the active participation of EBMs in increasing scholarly output of parent journals. We also studied the publication activity of foreign members of EBMs in Russian journals that turned out to bedramatically low. Formal involvement of foreign researchers to enhance the level of journal’s internationalization may explain this situation. It is shown, that the fact of publication fails to significantly impact on journal’s ranking positions. The scientific quality of EBMs papers has proved to be of higher value: in case of high quality of EBMs papers, the number of readers and citations start to increase. On the other hand, uncited papers by EBMs have the lowest or even negative effect on the journal’s rank. The findings can be of interest to editors-in-chief and founders of academic journals.

Representation of Women as Editors of the Top Surgery Journals in the World.

Background Editorial board members, as experts in their field, often publish relevant research in journals on which they serve. This combined role of “editor-as-author” may be a source for conflict of interest in the peer review process. In Gastroenterology-focused journals, the prevalence of instances for editor-as-author has not been explored. Aims To estimate the prevalence of editor-as-author among high impact factor (IF) Gastroenterology-focused journals. Methods We used a cross-sectional study design. We used InCites Journal reports to identify 30 Gastroenterology journals with the highest IF in 2020, wherein we included journals that had publicly accessible board membership that indicated the following: institution/city/country; and at least the first name initial and entire last name for editorial board members. We created a list of all editorial board members, excluding any emeritus editors and society representatives. Among these journals, we identified all original research articles using the Web of Science, wherein we excluded any editorial material, meeting abstracts, and clinical practice guidelines. Among these original publications, two authors then independently and in duplicate determined any instances of authors who had editorial board membership. The primary outcome measure was the prevalence of editors-as-authors. Secondary outcomes involved the number of editorial board members with first authorships and senior/corresponding authorships, as well as the number of articles that disclosed editorial board membership. Results Among the 30 Gastroenterology-focused journals that had the highest IF, 24 met the relevant inclusion criteria. These journals had a total of 6162 original publications, of which 992 (16.1%) had at least one instance of editor-as-author; 8 (0.1%) articles disclosed that there was editorial board membership among its authors. Among all 24 included journals, there were a total 2106 editorial board members. Of these members, 635 (30.2%) had at least one instance of editor-as-author, wherein 134 and 263 members were first authors and senior/corresponding authors, respectively. Conclusions Our study found that approximately one third of editorial board members among high IF Gastroenterology-focused journals were also authors in these same journals. Future analysis will focus on determining whether there is the difference in quality of published work compared to those without editorial board membership. Funding Agencies None

CRT 2018: Welcome New CRM Editorial Board, Women in Interventional Cardiology, and President Barack Obama.

It Takes a Village: The Team Effort Behind The Journal of Chiropractic Education

For this Special Issue "2020 Feature Papers by JDB' Editorial Board Members," we present a collection of studies, including original research papers, and review articles by our distinguished editorial board members that focus on advances in understanding multicellular organisms' growth, differentiation, and remodeling [...].

Editorial

With this issue IEM starts its sixth year of life. For those who have worked in this project, it is a great pleasure to see the continuous growth of our creature. After the successful obtaining of the first impact factor (IF 2009 = 2.371) we all continue to work to increase the quality of the papers published and the pleasure of the readers to have nice and useful articles. Our journal is now internationally recognized as an important one in our academic field. Much work still needs to be done. The section of Clinical evidence and Health Technology Assessment leaded by the past Editor-in-chief Gian Franco Gensini with the invaluable work of Lorenzo Moja and Gianni Virgili (among the others) is growing. The Emergency section, leaded by my co-editor Peter Rosen, with Kevin Ban and a group of distinguished experts of different countries, receives many submissions and our colleagues do a great job. Also the Internal Medicine section has an increased number of submissions and several members of Editorial Board have begun to directly manage some papers as editors. All the work of IEM, as a whole, has much increased during the second half of 2010, because of the announcement of Impact Factor. We have received over 250 new submissions versus 120 in the first part of the year. Thus, the submission rate is over ?100% in the second part of the year versus the first and ?60% in the all 2010 versus 2009. This means, on the other hand, that, more or less, the mean rejection rate should be 70–75% at the moment. Thus, there has been more work for all the members of Editorial board, Advisory board and Operative group that again I thank for their invaluable work together with all people from Springer. Usage of IEM articles increased by 19% from 2008 to 2009. Moreover, in the period January–August, the 2010 growth rate of full-text downloads reached 36%. PubMed linkouts number represents the number of links from PubMed to SpringerLink full-texts. The more the linkouts are, the more the visibility of the journal grows. Comparing the data related to the period January–August, PubMed linkouts increased by 21% from 2009 to 2010. A special thank to all reviewers who have contributed to the success of our Journal, for the time and dedication spent. We have still the problem of those colleagues who do not reply after having been invited to act as reviewers, which produces delays in the process of reviewing. Again we ask potential reviewers to help us at least with a prompt reply and with the suggestion of other potential reviewers when they cannot do the job. As I previously wrote, we encourage our members to provide feedback on the Journal and its content. If there are suggestions, please let us know. I am sure you will continue to support our Journal and I wish you all a wonderful 2011! Domenico Prisco Editor-in-Chief Internal and Emergency Medicine

Despite the significant increase in women in academic medicine over the last 50 years, women are still under-represented in leadership positions in academia. However, there is a lack of data on the diversity of editorial boards in Middle Eastern medical journals. So, we aim to portray the diversity of editorial boards of Iraqi medical journals by conducting a cross-sectional analysis of the editorial boards' members of all Iraqi medical journals. Gender, affiliation and specialty were extracted from the journals' websites and/or from the professional profiles of the editorial board members. Twenty-five journals and 446 editorial board members were analysed. More than half of editorial board members specialized in basic science, while 39.76% specialized in clinical specialties. Approximately, 20.18% of editorial board members (regardless their role) were women. Four percent of editor-in-chief were women. There were significant differences in editorial role according to gender (p < 0.0001), yet residency (p = 0.688) and specialty (p = 0.190) did not differ according to their gender. Most editorial board members were affiliated with Baghdad. So, we can conclude that there is a significant under-representation of women across all roles on the editorial board of medical journals especially in the leading positions. All stakeholders, publishers, authors and academics should commit to ensure the diversity of editorial boards.

Updates for the Journal of Pediatric Nursing Readership